Short story: a member of my family got a refurbished TP-Link repeater TL-WA860RE v1 from Amazon a while ago . He tried to configure it but could not, so just stored it in the box until last month, I came to his home and asked him about the repeater (at that point warranty was already expired).

As he told me he was not able to make it work, I gave it a try: The repeater was able to provide an IP address with DHCP to any computer connected to the Ethernet port, but status LED was always yellow, the WebUI was not available, and of course there was no way of configuring it (no telnet, no SSH, nothing).

In the end I discovered that the previous owner failed to flash a firmware on the device, so I saw a lot of errors regarding USB subsystem, kernel modules and even Squash Filesystem: (more…)

As part of the 16th SUSE hackweek and a project to run old native games on modern GNU/Linux distribution, I created some easy instructions and a script to install Loki’s native SimCity 3000 Unlimited (sc3u) and patch it to run at least openSUSE and Debian (should work for more distributions as well)

The biggest problem with sending email from AWS EC2 instances is that -sooner or later- your instance’s IP will be added to a blacklist. It doesn’t matter how secure your MTA is. It doesn’t matter if it’s not reachable from the internet. And it doesn’t matter if you are not sending spam at all.

Sooner or later one of your neighbors using an IP on the same IP range your instance is, will send spam, Then one of the blacklists (such as Trendmicro’s) will add the whole range as spam sender.

In theory you could try setting up rDNS but that’s not always a warranty of staying out of the lists. And obviously what AWS recommends is using (and paying) Simple Email Service or SES. It’s pretty easy to setup and pretty easy to use (you can setup IAM accounts to use SMTP).

For some services the configuration will be easy: add the SES endpoint as SMTP server hostname, enable SSL, select TCP port 465, add your credentials, and ready to go.

Tibco Spotfire is one of the commercial options for Business Intelligence Analytics, with several different components available to be installed.

Some of the components, such as Tibco Spotfire Server (which is the core of the Tibco Spotfire platform), are more or less easy to automate if you decided to go for the GNU/Linux version as it works on Red Hat, and you can use Oracle as DB, even as AWS RDS (I will create another post for this).

But some other components can be tricky, specially those running on Microsoft Windows.

However, this repository was using Nexus as a war file in Tomcat, something which is now deprecated by Sonatype, and won’t be provided for the upcoming 3.0 release. Besides that, the war doesn’t include support for NPM or Ruby gems, and uploading new war files to the repository was slow and inefficient.

A lot of times you inherit a repository with several binaries which cause an exponential size growth if they’re modified. But a GIT repository should not host binaries. In fact no VCS should host those files.

Other times a developer (or yourself) uploads something mistake that shouldn’t be on the repository.

In either case you’ll want to delete those files.

I tried several guides but it never worked as supposed because they don’t update all the branches on the repository and therefore the file is never deleted.